[3] From 2001-2004, Davis worked as a corporate lawyer at Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich, LLC in Palo Alto, California advising venture-backed start-ups in Silicon Valley (now part of DLA Piper).
[4] He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher with Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology from 2008 to 2012.
[14][15] In 2015, Davis and his co-authors were awarded the Cozzarelli Prize by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for a paper they published on the role of China's international trade and air pollution in the United States.
Davis co-founded two non-profit organizations related to climate change, the Climate Conservancy, a group that pioneered product-level carbon accounting,[17] and Near Zero, an organization that "...provides credible, impartial, and actionable assessment with the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to near zero".
He also works with the Carbon accounting startup Watershed[19] and currently serves on the Technical Council of the Science Based Targets initiative.